Brit-pop singer Jarvis Cocker has a new book, Mother, Brother, Lover, being published this fall by Faber & Faber. Cocker, known for his epic and sultry evocations of everyday life in songs such as “Common People,” talks with Faber publisher Lee Brackstone about writing lyrics, and how falling out of a window led to a lyrical breakthrough.

In her eloquent New York Times review of Chester Brown’s Paying for It—an illustrated memoir about his experiences with prostitutes—Annie Sprinkle announces, “As someone who has had sex of one sort or another with more than 3,000 johns myself, I can attest to the fact that all of Brown’s encounters ring absolutely, gloriously true.” And while we’re counting, Brown has calculated his financial cost of consorting with paid ladies: “If I went every two weeks, that would be 26 times a year; 26 multiplied by $160 equals $4,160 a year—that’s quite a bit."

At the online literary review Ugarte, Morten Hoi Jensen talks with poet, translator, and biographer Mark Ford, who has just published his third collection of poems, Six Children, and completed a luminous translation of Raymond Roussel’sNew Impressions of Africa, which wasn’t easy: “As for translation, well, never again. It drives you nuts. Translating Nouvelles Impressions was like doing a fiendish crossword puzzle all day every day.”